I don't regard this as a matter for debate. This tactic of software companies redefining bugs as "features" indicates a lack of respect for their customers, and as a major Autodesk customer, I would prefer that my complaints are treated as such rather than brushed off. Unfortunately, I'm somewhat used to this attitude with Autodesk, but it's a shame, as your customer service is otherwise considerably better than your major competitor.
Thanks for the pointer to the blog article, but that hardly leaps out at me if I go to the Design Review download page. I, and the several other users reporting this bug, have no way of knowing why the software we have just downloaded simply fails to work. Our firewall settings are not an attempt to "bypass" your feature - they are an important part of security for a global firm with over 10,000 employees, and they are not going to be changed just for this one product. Your "feature" should fail gracefully when it can't phone home e.g. with an error message after 15 seconds stating "unable to connect to update site, please check your firewall settings", which could then offer a simple tick-box to decline future update checking. Simply hanging for 5 minutes is not a "feature" it's a bug.